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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
We'll never hear the end of Reverend Jeremiah Wright this year. Republican strategists will beat that gong until our ears ring. For working-class voters who listen to talk radio but don't monitor the Web (where office-bound middle-class voters have met and embraced Obama), Wright's hooting, satirical, anti-American rants have thrown a cloud of suspicion over Obama. Is he a militant Black Muslim or a radical "Marxist-Leninist" (as I heard an irate female caller confidently call him on the radio)? These outlandish fears can only be dissipated by Obama himself as the American public comes to know him.
As I recently told Mark Simone on his New York WABC radio show, the Rev. Wright controversy actually solidified my support of Obama (though Wright himself, on the basis of his performance at the National Press Club, seems to have become a buffoon). I was steadily impressed by Obama's idealism and deliberativeness; his refusal to spout the rote demagogic formulas that pour so freely from Hillary's lips; and his patient forbearance in debates, where (like an aikido master) he warily sidestepped Hillary's blatant provocations, meant to goad him into errors. He has a judicious, reflective, authentically presidential temperament.
My one nagging question about Obama, given his Kenyan lineage and broad background in Indonesia and Hawaii as well as his Ivy League education, was how well he knew the history, passions and aspirations of African-American culture. But Obama's 20-year membership in Rev. Wright's Chicago megachurch completely reassured me on this score. First of all, sermons constitute only one small part of any congregation's rich religious and social life. Second, not for a moment do I believe -- as talk radio shows are tirelessly alleging -- that Obama's political views are secretly identical to Wright's. On the contrary, it was through listening to Wright, who was reciting a black liberationist theology that has been standard issue for a half-century, that Obama honed his desire to bridge the gap between racial and ethnic communities in the United States. This is one reason I believe Obama is the right person at the right time for the presidency. Where Hillary divides and sows bitterness, Obama wants to unite and heal. It is a project that all Americans of good will should wish to succeed.
Meanwhile, Hillary's flying of the feminist flag has become much more ostentatious as her campaign wanes. Sexism will inevitably be the lurid postmortem apologia for why she failed to break the ultimate glass ceiling. Never mind her faults, limitations and dizzy-making multiple personality disorder as a candidate -- or her depressingly unfeminist professional attachment to an alpha male who may be the real reason she won the votes of many working-class white men. I repeatedly heard sound-bite interviews with rural male Pennsylvanians who said they were voting for Hillary either because Bill Clinton would actually be running her White House or because Bill had produced the prosperity of the '90s (a highly questionable assertion) and thus can cure our ailing economy.
Hillary has certainly given a blast of artificial resuscitation to male-bashing paleo-feminism, which is back with a vengeance. The blogosphere is awash with accusations of "traitor" against women who have the temerity to vote for Obama. Gloria Steinem's anointed heir, Susan Faludi, weighed in with a recent New York Times op-ed about Hillary bizarrely arguing that a sports referee or umpire is "coded feminine" (huh?) and parallels the vintage American feminist as "prissy hall monitor" and "purse-lipped killjoy" -- a stereotype that Hillary the pugilist has broken. (Oh, really? When has Faludi ever endorsed pugilistic feminism before?)
With nice synchronicity, that same week Rebecca Walker, Steinem's goddaughter, was complaining about entrenched feminist "ideology" in the Sunday Times in London. The brand of feminism promoted by her mother, feminist icon Alice Walker, is in Rebecca's words "close to a cult": "I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought." My own protest against the ideology problem in feminism has been going on, through word and deed, since the late 1960s. My latest salvo, "Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform" (the keynote address of a conference on feminism at Harvard University in April) will appear in the Spring/Summer issue of Arion, to be published in print and on the Web in June.
Another point: Most of the media fell hook, line and sinker for the "Iron my shirt!" stunt at a Hillary campaign event in January in New Hampshire, where two scruffy male hecklers were clearly in collusion with her staff. (The signs -- including one suspiciously permitted on the stage itself -- were carefully positioned and lit, and Hillary had a pat prepared line to draw camera attention to them.) Those dorky guys, at least one with a link to a radio station, are far too young to have the slightest knowledge of an era when women ironed men's shirts -- or when shirts needed ironing at all! Businessmen's shirts go to the cleaners nowadays, and everyone else's gear is just tossed into the dryer. That hoax was designed to reawaken the atavistic resentments of older women voters -- and it worked.
[Watch a clip of the "Iron my shirt!" stunt, below]
